ECI Management Expands Revenue Management Program with Rainmaker LRO

ATLANTA, GA – September 12, 2011 - The Rainmaker Group, the leading provider of revenue management and profit optimization solutions to the multifamily and gaming/hospitality industries, today announces the growth of its partnership with ECI Management, a division of ECI Groups, a privately owned real estate organization in the Southeast. ECI initially implemented Rainmaker LRO™ (Lease Rent Options) at 16 remote communities in March 2011. LRO was selected to deliver revenue management strategies because of its ability to utilize a community’s actual traffic and leasing data as well as comparable competitor data to provide pricing recommendations regardless of urban, suburban or rural markets.

Once the system was operational, ECI’s executive team immediately realized the benefits of LRO’s streamlined integration with its property management software and its simple and efficient process of delivering pricing recommendations and reports. ECI decided to ramp up its engagement and rolled out the solution across the remainder of its 36-property portfolio by July 2011.

“We were very impressed with LRO’s ability to quickly and easily integrate with our existing software platform during the rollout at our remote communities,” said Harris Carlock, vice president of property management for ECI. “After interacting with the system, seeing how it makes pricing recommendations and recognizing the value our on-site teams gained from LRO’s reports, it was an easy decision to implement the solution across our portfolio.”

The Rainmaker Group implementation team was committed to making the transition onto LRO as easy as possible. Through multiple open-forum discussions during the rollout, on-site managers were encouraged to discuss any concerns and ask questions openly and honestly. The implementation team then addressed each concern directly to ensure every end-user was comfortable with the solution. Once the on-site staff realized the community data they entered into the system, including lease expirations, occupancy rates and renewals, directly influenced LRO’s pricing recommendations, they embraced the system. This site level empowerment helped build confidence among the leasing professionals that LRO’s recommendations were accurate and appropriate. Now fully integrated, ECI’s team values LRO’s detailed Pricing Trend Report, which provides a clear overview of each community’s pricing trends and explains how LRO reached its pricing recommendations.

Carlock continued, “The implementation and customer service LRO delivered were exemplary and we realized we would be hindering our success in the marketplace without a unified revenue management strategy. Thanks to LRO’s implementation team, our on-site managers not only understand but believe in the system, which has helped close more leases according to the pricing recommendations. Although it’s still early, we’re already starting to see communities benefit from LRO’s solution.”

“We knew LRO would be successful with the initial 16 ECI communities,” explains Annie Laurie McCulloh, vice president of business consulting for Rainmaker, “because our solution inherently works in any location, remote or not. We couldn’t be happier that ECI’s entire portfolio is now benefiting from LRO’s pricing recommendations. Our team is dedicated to delivering unmatched implementation services and it is wonderful to hear our client is overwhelmingly satisfied with the deployment, customer service and reporting we’ve provided to their business.”

Rainmaker LRO™ is the leading multifamily lease rate optimization solution used to maximize revenue from apartment leases. The system calculates optimized pricing based on hundreds of factors that influence rate setting, including traffic and lease duration, move-in dates, competitive affects and other metrics. The system also produces enterprise-wide demand forecasts by measuring and analyzing historical and current market metrics and performing calculations necessary for occupancy predictions that are dynamically updated as market conditions change.